“Sometimes, if I am not careful, and I stare too long at a flower, it shrivels and dies.”
“Bee, why are you staring at me? I am not a flower??”
“Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.”
“She’d passed sentence on God two years ago, and she fed her doubts of Him daily, taking care they didn’t shrivel and die.”
“But he was wrong about the sun—I didn’t need it. All the sun in the world wouldn’t stop a flower from dying—if it had no one to care for it.”
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”